Talk:differential calculus

Adjective form?

What is the adjective form for Calculus or, more specifically, Differential Calculus? If one wanted to refer to the optimization techniques of economics, and make clear they are based on differential calculus with a short adjective, what might work? "...calculitic optimization techniques"? Any help will be appreciated. N2e 15:27, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

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Record of the Discussion of the question in the Tea room is inserted below:

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I think it's almost a given that any sort of continuous-domain mathematical optimization technique is going to be based on differential calculus; it might be more meaningful to say either "univariate optimization techniques" or "multivariate optimization techniques", depending. However, if you really want to emphasize the calculus, I don't think you're going to do better than "calculus-based". The OED has a bunch of adjectives relating to (deprecated template usage) calculus, but I think it would be awkward to try to apply them to (deprecated template usage) calculus. —Ruakh_TALK 19:54, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Most often, I see the noun (deprecated template usage) calculus used attributively, rather than an adjective. For example: calculus techniques, calculus approach, or (as Ruakh has noted) calculus-based when an adjective is used. --EncycloPetey 20:31, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Depending on context, differential or differentiable may also be suitable; cf. google:"differential optimization techniques" google:"differentiable optimization techniques". I get a headache whenever I try to figure out the actual difference between the two terms, much as I do when I open Geometry from a Differentiable Viewpoint, my differential geometry coursebook which I have now been carrying around for more than a decade in the hope that I will someday have the time, patience, and cognitive power to understand it. -- Visviva 05:53, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

Syntactic system

According to Page 36 of Growing ideas of number, by John N Crossley.

The ordinary differential calculus is (largely) a syntactic system, as Leibniz pointed out. It has meaning for us (in terms of the slope of graphs, and so on), but can also be taken as being simply a set of formal rules (The same is not true of the integral calculus) which can be applied without understanding, such as

JMGN (talk) 11:35, 27 August 2023 (UTC)